Is the US the "spiritual home" of legal technology? So Legal
IT would have it. What, then, are current and future
trends? (And I promise this is as close as I’ll come to the
"tennis without a net" custom of New Year prognostications never
to be revisited again.)
Outsourcing, for starters, is the crazy aunt in the attic that nobody
wants to talk about—with the brave exception of my friend Jim
Lantonio, Executive Director of Milbank, who conspicuously off-shored
technical and administrative support last year, so far with evident
success. Why so mum? On top of the general sensitivity
surrounding the politically charged issue, law firms have the added
controversial layers of confidentiality and stratospheric
client expectations about work product quality. Legal IT posits
that small and mid-sized firms may be the early adopters here, but
I have a different theory: Given the steep learning and adoption
curve, and the sheer transactional scale needed to justify the upfront
investment, I think the only firms in a position to recognize a
meaningful return on outsourcing are the large firms. My prediction? The
serious discussion pro and con on outsourcing will only begin when
one or more large firms is discovered to be already doing it.
The always-sane Brad Robbins, co-founder of Baker
Robbins & Co., identifies (a) centralization of data in firm-wide
operations centers; and (b) record retention and email storage as the
primary front-burner issues. Partly this simply reflects law-land’s
catching up with the rest of the professional service sector, and financial
services, in "back office" robustness in general, but the explosion
of electronic data discovery has surely accelerated the trend. Harris
Tilevitz, CIO of Skadden, confirms that precisely those initiatives
have been top of his agenda this year, and when asked what new or innovative
technology he foresees coming, he comes up empty-handed. Certainly
in the post-9/11 world, business continuity and disaster recovery plans
have moved up the priority list, and one way to deal with them effectively
is by centralizing data (in more than one place, to be sure).
While the second half of the article devotes itself to the wireless
world—Blackberry or Treo? Laptop or smart phone? On
a "need to have" basis or just for the asking?—I
find far greater interest in Brad’s (and others’) observations about
how the nature of IT within large firms is changing. To wit:
| Five Years Ago | Now |
|---|---|
| Focus on HR, finance, basic wordprocessing, functional email | Focus on KM, CRM, collaborative tools |
| Key "end user" for IT was primarily staff | Key end users are lawyers |
| Investing in creating a hitherto non-existent infrastructure was order of the day |
Getting the most bang for the buck out of existing systems is Job 1 |
Does this sound like your firm?
